Related papers: Distracted Robot: How Visual Clutter Undermine Rob…
Despite strong multi-task pretraining, existing policies often exhibit poor task steerability. For example, a robot may fail to respond to a new instruction ``put the bowl in the sink" when moving towards the oven, executing ``close the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning has shown promise for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in robotic manipulation, but deployment-time visual shifts pose practical challenges. A key difficulty is that standard task rewards supervise…
Non-prehensile pushing actions have the potential to singulate a target object from its surrounding clutter in order to facilitate the robotic grasping of the target. To address this problem we utilize a heuristic rule that moves the target…
Lifelong learning is critical for embodied agents in open-world environments, where reinforcement learning fine-tuning has emerged as an important paradigm to enable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models to master dexterous manipulation…
Robotic failure is all too common in unstructured robot tasks. Despite well-designed controllers, robots often fail due to unexpected events. How do robots measure unexpected events? Many do not. Most robots are driven by the sense-plan act…
Visual representations are central to the learning and generalization capabilities of robotic manipulation policies. While existing methods rely on global or dense features, such representations often entangle task-relevant and irrelevant…
Research in machine learning is making progress in fixing its own reproducibility crisis. Reinforcement learning (RL), in particular, faces its own set of unique challenges. Comparison of point estimates, and plots that show successful…
In this work, we evaluate the effectiveness of representation learning approaches for decision making in visually complex environments. Representation learning is essential for effective reinforcement learning (RL) from high-dimensional…
In recent years, increasing attention has been directed to leveraging pre-trained vision models for motor control. While existing works mainly emphasize the importance of this pre-training phase, the arguably equally important role played…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm in Embodied AI. However, the significant computational overhead of processing redundant visual tokens remains a critical bottleneck for real-time robotic deployment.…
We focus on the task of goal-oriented grasping, in which a robot is supposed to grasp a pre-assigned goal object in clutter and needs some pre-grasp actions such as pushes to enable stable grasps. However, in this task, the robot gets…
Stereotypes, bias, and discrimination have been extensively documented in Machine Learning (ML) methods such as Computer Vision (CV) [18, 80], Natural Language Processing (NLP) [6], or both, in the case of large image and caption models…
In this work, we highlight vulnerabilities in robotic systems integrating large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) due to input modality sensitivities. While LLM/VLM-controlled robots show impressive performance across…
Applying reinforcement learning (RL) methods on robots typically involves training a policy in simulation and deploying it on a robot in the real world. Because of the model mismatch between the real world and the simulator, RL agents…
Integrating visual-language instructions into visuomotor policies is gaining momentum in robot learning for enhancing open-world generalization. Despite promising advances, existing approaches face two challenges: limited language…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable embodied decision-making but rely heavily on imitation learning, leading to compounding errors and poor robustness under distribution shift. Reinforcement learning (RL) can mitigate these issues…
Robot manipulation in cluttered environments often requires complex and sequential rearrangement of multiple objects in order to achieve the desired reconfiguration of the target objects. Due to the sophisticated physical interactions…
Robotic manipulation policies often degrade over extended horizons, yet existing benchmarks provide limited insight into why such failures occur. Most prior benchmarks are either simulation-based or report aggregate success, making it…
Robots should be able to learn complex behaviors from human demonstrations. In practice, these human-provided datasets are inevitably imbalanced: i.e., the human demonstrates some subtasks more frequently than others. State-of-the-art…
Robotic failure is all too common in unstructured robot tasks. Despite well designed controllers, robots often fail due to unexpected events. How do robots measure unexpected events? Many do not. Most robots are driven by the senseplan- act…